More investment, stricter data protection needed, say internet conference attendees

China has been ramping up data protection but still lags behind developed countries such as the EU and US with respect to investment and legislation, Chinese experts said at a conference on Tuesday.

“In the past five years, only 1-2 percent of China’s annual IT investment went toward network security, while in Japan that proportion can reach 10 percent,” Liu Bing, CEO of Vackbot, a virtual hacker robot company based in Beijing, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

Liu said after China’s cyber security law came into force in June last year, investment is expected to increase at an estimated compound annual growth rate of 30 percent.

China has accelerated development of cyber laws and regulations since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012.

Thirty-five percent of 1,285 respondents to a survey conducted by Tencent’s research arm Penguim Intelligence expressed “constant concerns over personal data leakage.”

Data leaks seem common in China. A report issued by the China Consumers’ Association on August 29 said that 85.2 percent of app users in China have experienced data leakage.

Company personnel are likely to leak sensitive data about their clients given the high profits and light punishment, said Ding Ranran, chief managing officer of Beijing-based CirrusGate Technology Inc.

“Chinese authorities have issued lots of rules on cyber security, but they’re not as strict as those applied in the EU and US,” Ding told the Global Times on Tuesday at the Internet Security Conference in Beijing that ends Thursday.

Effective this May, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has prompted Chinese regulators and company leaders to implement data privacy rules, she said. “Industry players like us expect rules with similarities to GDPR to be launched in China soon.”